


In The Breezes Of The Sky

by CopperBeech



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angel Wings, Author is a romantic sap, Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), BAMF Aziraphale (Good Omens), Cavorting On National Trust Sites, Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Ficlet, First Kiss, Fluff, Flying, Hopeless tense switching so sue me, M/M, Memories of the Fall, Wings, post-not-apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:28:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29182560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperBeech/pseuds/CopperBeech
Summary: Crowley hasn't used his wings since the Fall. They didn't save him then, and he doesn't like the reminder.Aziraphale is not the kind of angel who takes No for an answer.“What if I fall?”“I’ll catch you.”The angel means it. His own wings are radiant, majestic, powerful; Crowley’s just watched, transfixed, helplessly in love (did it show?) as Aziraphale put away the fusty bookseller’s kit, became all light, faint shapes of great and mighty beasts interpenetrating his form as he soared and plunged, joyful in the late afternoon sunbeams. He’s a Principality, whose job has always been protection, and a warrior of Heaven, deceptively strong and implacable under that diffident manner.He would. He’d catch me.Crowley imagines how that would feel.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 55
Kudos: 131





	In The Breezes Of The Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Now with fanart! See endnotes.

“What if I fall?”

“I’ll catch you.”

The angel means it. His own wings are radiant, majestic, powerful; Crowley’s just watched, transfixed, helplessly in love (did it show?) as Aziraphale put away the fusty bookseller’s kit, became all light, faint shapes of great and mighty beasts interpenetrating his form as he soared and plunged, joyful in the late afternoon sunbeams. He’s a Principality, whose job has always been protection, and a warrior of Heaven, deceptively strong and implacable under that diffident manner. _He would. He’d catch me._

Crowley imagines how that would feel.

Most of Box Hill in Surrey is tramped over by day-trippers, but, especially with discreet miracles available, you can find places to be on your own. This one looked out over the North Downs beyond a near-sheer drop, the fields and hedgerows a luminous mosaic of irregular quadrilaterals. Crowley could whiff the green smell blooming up in the late-summer heat.

“I – I haven’t, y'know. Not since Eden.”

“What, that long ago? Why ever not?”

“I just – didn’t like them any more.” Crowley doesn’t say: _my wings were burnt black, they were still ragged and charred and stank of sulphur, and yours were made of clouds and glory and I was ashamed. Not of what I did, but of what Heaven made of me. So I put them away._ “And now they just – won’t manifest. I can feel them in there, but – nothing.” _And they ache to be let out, like a phantom limb._

“But they did at the airbase, plain as day.”

“Shock. Somethin’. Dunno. You yelled at me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It worked. Everything's still here, en't it?”

“I’m sure you can do it again. You just need to try.”

“D’ye think I haven’t?”

“Crowley. I didn’t mean to – “

“No, no, ’s all right. Came up here for a picnic, enjoyed it. Been promisin’ it to ourselves all these years, en’t we?” But he stays at the edge of the drop, gazing out over the jigsaw puzzle of England’s countryside: deep cool greens of ash and oak standing in clusters, yellow of brassicas, baked brown of summer-dried grass. When his wings were white none of this had been made. To soar in the free air above it, look down on it as She did, instead of _on thy belly shalt thou crawl, and dust shalt thou eat._

“You want to,” said Aziraphale.

Crowley shook his head, turned to walk away. He almost toppled backwards when a hand in the center of his scrawny chest stopped him like a soft wall.

“Let me help,” said the angel.

Was it just a few weeks ago that he’d been the one entreating the angel to come with him? “Nothin’ you can do. Let’s just – “

He wasn’t sure how Aziraphale’s arm became clamped around him like a parachute harness, how the other lifted him under the crook of his knees, snakeskin-booted feet dangling. There was a rush of air and a snap as the bright arcs of wing burst into existence again around them, half-blinding him even in his glasses; a jolt of disorientation as the ground pulled away so smoothly he couldn’t say when they’d left it. The land tilted and fell beneath them.

Wind ate the sound of his voice as he shouted the angel’s name, _what the fuck are you doing,_ yielded to the thrumming rhythm of Aziraphale’s wings beating the air into a staircase they could ascend, a dance floor, a highway. The dropping sun shone through the long primaries, turning them to gold.

He was aloft in the arms of an angel, and it was _good_ , so good.

“When you go over the water,” said the angel, and he’d used some miracle to mute the thunder of the air around them, “you can see below the surface sometimes. All the creatures She put in the deep on the Fifth Day. And over the cities they built, the lights they make, it’s like your stars come to shine up from the Earth. Not Fallen, Crowley. Here because they belong here, just as _you_ do. Would you like to see that? With me?”

Crowley can’t answer, because fear and longing are hijacking his breath and he does remember Falling; because Heaven had held him in its arms before and then slammed him into the skin of the newly formed planet, a shot-put that went past vacuum and Van Allen Belt and Heaviside layer and stratosphere, straight through the cooling crust, a meteor of scorching feathers and despair.

“Your choice this time,” said the angel in his ear. “What you taught them. Taught me. I’ll let go. But only if you want. And I’ll bear you up again, if you need me to. But I don’t think you will.”

Crowley managed to find Aziraphale’s hand, braced around his narrow ribs; squeeze it. _Yes._

“All right, dear. Ready?”

Crowley tilted his head back, looked up into the pale violet of an eastern sky already pulling away from the sun.

“Now.”

At first the drop left his stomach yards behind and punched the air out of him, and he twisted and flailed, looking in panic for a sign of the angel below; then some friendly current blew up under him, like a warm clasp, and while he was still trying to suck in a breath he didn’t need, the muscles beneath his shoulder blades began to ache and cramp. Then it felt as if the air were heaving him upward, lifting him by the scruff as the broad black pinions remembered on their own how to catch the updrafts and spread double his height.

Surrey rolled backward beneath him, an ordnance map given life. Shadows were stealing over the land eastward, and far south, the direction they were flying, he could see faint sparkles of light off water.

He pulled the wings in, arrowing toward the ground – diving, no longer Falling – swooped upward again with a snap of feathers; saw the small radiance of the angel growing into a second sun as Aziraphale hurtled past him, rolled, came face to face, treading air in a shimmering hover. Crowley felt himself grinning stupidly.

“It _is_ rather spiffing, isn’t it?”

Crowley reached out with both hands.

They had danced for centuries, closer, further away, closer again, and it was like that for a moment as they found the pace that would let them hover together, suspended between Earth and Heaven. Then he was, impossibly, in the angel’s embrace, _I knew it would feel that way,_ and bubbling with laughter, weeping with the buffeting of the wind in his sensitive eyes, that’s all it was, until Aziraphale lifted far enough away to beam pinkly at him.

“You know, my dear, they’re really quite beautiful. You can’t imagine. Please, never hide them away so long again.”

The kiss was delicate as a downfeather, and burned like a blessing, taking every memory that was painful or shameful or fearful, leaving only love.

Crowley hovered for two more grateful heartbeats, then dropped backwards, somersaulting in the freedom of the air.

“Race you, angel!” he shouted.

He didn’t turn to look. This time he knew the angel would follow him.

_There is freedom waiting for you  
_ _On the breezes of the sky,  
_ _And you ask “What if I fall?”_  
_Oh but my darling,  
_ _What if you fly?_

_― Erin Hanson_

**Author's Note:**

> This all happened because I came across the short poem quoted above in its entirety. I just got out of the way.
> 
> Come hassle me on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech!
> 
> UPDATE: Wonderful, adorable [animation](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KQarBF5YI_BYrLosOGquZQ-ntRe3e-Rv/view) by tarekgiverofcookies!


End file.
